National thanksgiving day

Lahore, Thursday, October 9, 1924

UNDER the direction of Pandit Motilal Nehru, president of the Unity Conference, and the Working Committee of the Indian National Congress, October 8 was observed all over India as a day of national thanksgiving for the successful termination of the great and, in the opinion of the overwhelming majority of his countrymen, vicarious penance imposed by Mahatma Gandhi on himself three weeks ago. The Mahatma has said more than once that the penance was not vicarious but had been rendered necessary by the failure of the non-cooperation movement and by the fratricidal strife in the country. But this is an opinion which the vast majority of the good and true in the country have refused to accept. Many of these never accepted the non-cooperation programme or even the gospel of non-violent non-cooperation itself. Some even considered it entirely wrong, inexpedient and harmful to the best interests of the country. But few, very few, believed that there was anything in it calculated to divide Hindus and Mussalmans, except in the sense that every effort made to awaken them to their civic rights and their national destiny was bound to awaken in some of them simultaneously a consciousness of their communal rights and interests. The question of personal atonement by Mahatma, therefore, does not arise at all. In reality, it would be doing grave violence to one’s common sense and logical understanding, to believe that the ablest, the most consistent and the most indefatigable apostle of Hindu-Muslim unity of our time, perhaps in many generations, could have made himself responsible for the existing tensions.